A few days a go I had a very interesting chat with Ron “build your own application blocks” Jacobs (just kidding).

The conversation was so interesting because Ron managed to explain to me something that was not obvious from his blog posts. Lemme explain.

From his posts you could understand that MS (wants to)is dropping blue bricks and letting the community maintain and build new ones from now on, with some MS reps acting as team leads. What became clear to me after chatting it up with Ron is that this is not the case. MSFT will continue to create application blocks but stuff that does not have time/budget allocations can be sent off and be built by the community, thereby speeding up the process of creating new blocks. Of course, there has to be some sort of organizing mechanism to take care of product quality, but this is one of manyare issues that can be addresses.

So anyway, although Ron said he'll blog about it and explain his point of view, he didn't. Personally I thought you'd like to know this important tidbit. To me it makes all the difference in the world and I while I didn't support it at first I do support such a notion now that things are a bit clearer.